Yorkshire Mix

Yorkshire folk have a reputation for being tight. I used to wonder why. Now I'm back in God's County, though, I'm starting to get some ideas.

This is a 'jar sweet' (as in, sweets you buy by weight, from a large jar), called Yorkshire Mixture.

I have never seen Yorkshire Mix for sale outside of Yorkshire. You can buy it in our local corner shop, the one where you have to order the fish two days in advance. It's an odd little shop - the shelves are half empty and it looks a bit rubbish and yet, despite having a limited selection it's actually good stuff. And they sell some locally baked cakes, plus locally grown veg. And of course a range of sweets in jars.

Anyway, back to the Yorkshire Mix. It's basically the odds and ends, misshapes and factory floor sweepings from all the other jar sweets. And this is our great county's official sweet. It says it all, doesn't it?

Baby bore

Finally free to travel, TLOML is making up for almost a year's absence from his client's offices with an extended trip. He's gone for a little over two weeks, hitting up clients in LA, Vegas and San Francisco, and visiting his colleagues in Argentina.

Lady P and I are keeping ourselves busy in his absence, but we do miss TLOML. In fact, there isn't space on all the interwebs put together to list all the ways we miss him.

One of those ways, in particular, is that when he is here I can talk constantly about the minutiae of Lady P's activities, to someone whose job it is to care. I'm not just talking about cute stuff like the way she started staring at her hand underwater in her bath, or how she turned from her front to her back. I mean the deadly dull stuff like bowel movements, naps (length, location, amount of fussing), feeds (volume, timing, number of burps).

I know I'm cute, but let's face it, my nappies just aren't that interesting

Usually these little updates are just background noise while gin and tonics are being mixed, cups of tea made, or we're wandering around the supermarket.

While TLOML is away, I send them on email instead. It's tantamount to a bombardment some days. I can send half a dozen emails or more, in a day, outlining Lady P's behaviour. A particular highlight for him, I'm sure, was the one telling him she did 3 poos in 20 hours. To his credit he responded, and not with a request for me to cease and desist. Still, I'm not sure how many more of these missives he'll want to receive. I probably need to rein myself in.

And yet what can I do? I can't stop thinking about this stuff. It is quite literally my full time job.

In the absence of TLOML I am seeing even more than usual of my favourite little sister, and she's doing a valiant stand-in job when it comes to tolerating the baby blatherings. But I see her eyes glaze over after ten minutes or so of my elaborating on exactly why I think Lady P woke at 4.15am.

I suppose that's why people join those mother and baby groups - so they can talk about this stuff with a bunch of people who want to talk about it. The thing is, I don't want to talk about it. It's boring (that's why I have avoided those baby groups). I just can't help myself.

So I have decided to quit. Go cold turkey. No more nappy news emails, and no more unrequested* updates on overnight activities. It won't be easy but it must be done. I am resolved!

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Note the use of 'unrequested': pity the fool who ventures to ask the question 'how's she sleeping'. Man have I got some stories for them.

The yarn bomber strikes again

We may not have the cultural profile of London, NY or LA, but Saltburn has a thriving arts scene all of its own. The main attraction appears to be the yarnbomber.

I've posted before about the yarnbomber - the Royal embarrassment and Olympics displays of last summer. I thought you'd like to see up close some of the treats that that cluster of people on the pier are examining.

It's a sort of homage to Saltburn and seaside life.

Local star Meg the surfdog, and her owner

Those donkeys I mentioned

A heroic lifeboatman

A seagull turning its back on fish and chips (rather unlikely, that)

A full catch. Didn't know they caught octopus here. Wonder why it's so darn hard to buy then.

Alright, it ain't LACMA, nor the Tate, nor the Guggenheim. But this knitted art is worth more than all those galleries' contents to me - for they will raise a daily smile.

Sometimes

To quote the popular poem*, 'Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse'.

Sometimes, after a week of absurdly wintry weather, the sun comes out. Instead of going back into the house to grab a rain coat, you go back in to pick up your sunglasses and ditch your quilted jacket. The sun shines so convincingly that the icecream van makes the trip up from Whitby, to sell 'gothic' (blackcurrant and liquorice) icecream on the cliff top.

Sometimes, after a month of waking constantly during the night for snacky, comforty, unnecessary-but-impossible-to-deny feeds, a baby sleeps for four or five hours on the trot.

Sometimes, after weeks of refusing to take the 9am nap that is the bedrock of a pleasant morning, the baby just shuts her eyes and sleeps for fifty minutes straight without any fuss.

Today was such a day. At first I was lost. What to do with my morning, now I didn't need to spend it pushing Lady P around Saltburn in the grumpy pursuit of sleep (for her) and caffeine (for me)?

The answer was to take my rested self, and my smiling, happy baby, off for a walk on beach and some coffee and cake with my sister and her family. To sit in the sun and watch my nephews play sweet twinny games. And to amble along the cliff top eating a Whitby gothic icecream.

Good times. Long may they last. And, oh yes, may they happen for you.

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*Like many people I first saw these lines on the tube, in the Poems on the Underground series. Apparently Sheenagh Pugh 'long ago got sick of it'. It's a solid poem, but perhaps she felt it was cheapened by its popularity - kinda like the way I imagine the way The Lumineers might feel about that Ho Hey song. Anyway, for those who didn't see it on the tube, here it is in full.


Sometimes
Sheenah Pugh (b. 1950)

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you. 

Have baby, will travel

Given our transatlantic lives, we knew we couldn't put off travelling with Lady P for long. Our recent trip, as she was hitting  the grand age of twelve weeks, was something of a baptism of fire then. We headed to a somewhat inaccessible resort town in the US for a week on a beach and a wedding, taking in TLOML's old college town on the way home.

Yeah, got my passport, ready to fly, whatevs

Getting to the Outer Banks is no short hop: it involved a couple of long drives, and three flights. We laid our heads in plenty of places too, staying in an airport hotel the night before we left, then a beach house for a week, then a couple of nights in different hotels as we made our way home. Plus Lady P met about a dozen family members - not to mention the guests who cooed over her at the wedding we attended.

All told, it was for a little baby to handle. And Lady P managed admirably. She was passed from person to person, all of whom wanted smiles, cuddles and photos. She actually seemed to enjoy socialising most of the time. And when she wasn't exactly smiling, she at least wore an expression of bemused tolerance.

Lady P in the glare of the paps

Perhaps we'd worried too much. But we did spend a good deal of effort preparing for the trip. For example, we had her sleep in a travel cot at home for a few nights so it would feel familiar once we hit the road. And her clobber took up almost as much room as mine. As well as that travel cot, we packed several blankets, the BabyBjorn sling, a couple of familiar toys, and enough nappies to pad a small cell. I think it was worth doing all of that, as it reduced the number of emergency dashes to supermarkets, and meant much of her surroundings smelt, felt and sounded like home. I made sure in the mornings to sing the songs I always sing at home, and every night we followed the same bathtime /bedtime ritual we established when she was just a couple of days old. I think all those things helped her stay calm and happy.

(In retrospect we could have packed about a dozen fewer blankets, and we should have remembered to pack a bottle brush. We'll know for next time.)

By the end of the trip our ability to control Lady P's environment was severely challenged. We had no means to sterilise her bedtime bottle* in our hotel room. We went to Rite Aid in search of that weird sterilising fluid, but to no avail. In the end I spent about half an hour cleaning her bottles, using rubbing alcohol and piping hot water that the hotel kitchen promised us had been thoroughly boiled. Plus our room had a shower, which rather put paid to her sacred nightly bath. Again, we thought creatively and Lady P enjoyed her first shower. We figured anything that involves splashing water and nudity would do the trick.

Our resourcefulness paid off. She didn't get a horrible dirty-bottle-related sickness, and she slept like an angel that night. (In her buggy too - allowing us to sample the culinary delights of Chapel Hill.)

All in all, Lady P proved to be a very good, adaptable little traveller. Who knows, we may even take her on a trip again one day.

*Don't judge us, breastfeeding police! We all have our vices. Hers is a bottle of formula before bed.